The Bleeding Tooth Fungus (Hydnellum Peckii)

The Murder of Dorothy Jane Scott

The kidnapping and murder

32-year-old Dorothy Jane Scott and her family became extremely worried when Dorothy started receiving anonymous phone calls from a man saying that he wanted to kill her. The calls were short, and his demeanor sometimes changed to instead being affectionate and professing his love for Dorothy. At one point, the man instructed Dorothy to go outside and look for a gift he had left for her by her car. Outside, Dorothy found a single dead rose laying on her car. Perhaps the most frightening call Dorothy ever received was one where the man told her that he wanted to dismember her into small pieces and that he would make sure no one would ever find her remains.

Dorothy left her home on the evening of 28th May 1980 for a meeting. She noticed that one of her co-workers had small red marks on his arm. Dorothy, a female co-worker, and the male co-worker decided to go to the ER after suspecting that he had been bitten by a spider. Dorothy drove her car to the hospital and waited with her female co-worker while the man was being treated by medical staff. After about two hours, the male co-worker was allowed to go home and Dorothy offered to drive her car up to the exit. She left her co-workers, and they waited for her outside. They saw her car driving up to them after a few minutes but suddenly sped off. They reported Dorothy missing after a couple of hours, and her burning car was found the next day, but Dorothy was nowhere to be found.

Dorothy’s parents started receiving phone calls shortly after she disappeared from an unknown man claiming he had killed her. The police concluded that the caller was most likely Dorothy’s killer.

The disappearance and probable kidnapping of Dorothy remained a mystery for four years until her remains were found beside Santa Ana Canyon Road. Dental records confirmed the remains as being Dorothy, but a cause of death could not be established because of the decomposition.

Aftermath

On June 12th, 1980, almost a month after Dorothy disappeared, an unknown man called the front desk of Orange County Register. The newspaper had published an article regarding Dorothy’s disappearance the previous day, and the man claimed to be Dorothy’s kidnapper and killer. He said that he had caught Dorothy cheating on him with another man and therefore decided to kill her. The man also gave some interesting details about what Dorothy had been wearing when she went missing, which had not been exposed to the media. The police believe that the man was the murderer, but they have never been able to trace him. The murder of Dorothy Jane Scott remains unsolved.

Epinephelus areolatus

Devil’s fingers - this must be the creepiest mushroom ever. It looks like a zombie hand reaching out to grab someone. It’s made to look even more realistic by the the presence of the what appears to be tattered sleeve at its ‘wrist’. 

Yamamato Takato

“One particularly bad night, Tom said wearily, “I wish he’d killed us too”. It was a thought we would have on many occasions over the years.”

— Sue Klebold, A Mother’s Reckoning

Roy Dell Schmidt as a young man. He would later be a victim of Texas Tower shooter Charles Whitman.

18 September 1936 - 1 August 1966.

After 46 years, “Jane Doe 59″ was finally identified as 19 year old Jeet Jurvetson. In 1969, she was found stabbed more than 150 times, just 5 miles down the road from where Sharon Tate and four others were viciously murdered by the Manson family. The style, location, and timing of Jurvetson’s murder has led police to believe it was the work of Manson’s followers. The Los Angelos Police Department interrogated Manson in Corcoran State Prison, but found no relevance. There was no evidence to support a link, but investigators have not ruled it out just yet.

“It’s always easy to think that Manson or the Manson family had to be involved in any kind of suspicious disappearance or murder in that era, particularly where stabbing was involved…it’s a convenient thing, since they were obviously so capable of any disgusting violent act,” — Jeff Guinn.